Having read Leo Mirani's criticism of gap years in India, and the comments from readers attacking all gap-year students, I feel that the concept of taking a year out requires some defence. As shown by the hugely popular and ever-quoted Gap Yah video, gap-year-bashing is quite in vogue this year. It is easy to see why: young, wealthy and often out of their comfort zone, these students are an easy target.

And indeed it would be right to ridicule the deluded and smug teenager who, having seen a few shacks and elephants, claims to have seen and understood the "real India" (or the "real" wherever they had chosen to visit). I would sympathise with Mirani's frustration at these people, but he doesn't seem to have met one, and I don't think, by and large, that they exist.

Is this particular gap-year student anything more than a lazy and patronising cliche? Have any of us really met this myth in the flesh? Of my own friends, I know people who have gone to Ghana, Peru and China, but none claim a monopoly of knowledge over these places. In fact, I've never met anyone claiming to know the "real" anywhere. Having lived in London almost all my life, I would not even say I know the "real" London.

It seems strange, considering recent laments about the decline of language learning and worries that the UK is becoming an increasingly introverted country that at the same time we mock young adults for trying, albeit sometimes awkwardly, to experience foreign cultures, make foreign friends and improve their knowledge of foreign languages. Of course, it would be naive to think that a few months' stint in a poverty-stricken country means you really understand it, but that is not what the vast majority of travellers think – only that they understand it slightly better.

On my own travels I went to southern Chile for almost four months, as I am interested in the region's politics and, undeniably, I came back more informed and with first-hand experience of the divisive legacy of Pinochet, the Chilean family unit and the melodramatic brilliance of Chilean soaps.

It is true that the idea of "self-discovery" is exaggerated, and it has been rightly pointed out that most gap-year students travel in some comfort and in the knowledge that in an emergency there is always their parents' credit card. They cannot therefore wholly immerse themselves into foreign cultures, but this does not mean we should belittle their attempts to try. In my experience at least, it was the physical separation from people I love that taught me the most, rather than seeing how the other side lives, as my great-uncle put it.

One particularly cynical accusation by Mirani against gap-year students is that "you have to do some suitably noble tasks between weeks spent smoking pot on Anjuna beach so the admissions committee at your university of choice doesn't think you're a complete wastrel". I don't pretend that my own teaching of English to five-year-old Chileans did much good at all, but I enjoyed every bit of it as did, hopefully, my students. The suggestion that it was in any way motivated by university admissions is a nonsense. In fact most of the volunteers I met wanted to go on a gap year long before the idea of university had even entered their heads.

The group described in Mirani's article are surely only a tiny minority, the depiction of gap-year students as simply wanting to go abroad to get pissed and stoned on the cheap and make themselves seem worldly in front of their Abercrombie & Fitch friends is a crass generalisation. It is easy to sneer at middle-class teenagers whose parents pay for them to travel abroad; in general it is harmless, but Mirani's attitude is full of the snobbery that he so deplores.